Within hours after Dane County Judge Juan Colas struck down major portions of Act 10, making the law “null and void” as far as local public employees were concerned, Democratic Party politicians used the ruling to go after campaign cash.

In an email to potential supporters, Lassa lobbies for money, pointing out that she was one of the so-called Wisconsin 14, the Democratic senators who fled the state in winter 2011 to stall a vote on Act 10.

Lassa said she wasn’t surprised when the judge overturned Gov. Scott Walker’s law that “stripped public employees of their workers’ rights.”

“You stood with me and my 13 Senate colleagues when Governor Walker and his allies began their attack on Wisconsin workers. Will you stand with me again?” Lassa asks, noting that a donation of $10, $25, $50 “or whatever you can afford today will help me continue the fight against the Walker agenda.”

For good measure, she repeats her plea, asserting that she will defeat Walker’s “rubber stamp candidate.”

Lassa’s 24th Senate District is among many districts the Republicans tweaked during the majority-led redistricting process, making the 24th a little more amenable to the GOP. Her challenger, Scott Kenneth Noble, is a Richfield Republican active in the central Wisconsin conservative moment. He led an unsuccessful recall campaign against Lassa last year.

Lassa’s cash call was followed by liberal group and Scott Walker detester One Wisconsin Now, under a campaign fundraising appeal headlined in bold, “Unconstitutional.”

“You and I always knew Scott Walker’s attack on workers’ rights was a violation of our values. And now a judge has ruled late Friday it was a violation of our rights and our laws,” writes Scot Ross, the group’s executive director.

In a letter titled, “This Isn’t Over,” Walker wrote that a “liberal activist judge in Madison” overturned the will of the people and imposed his personal beliefs on all of us.

“Sadly, this is what liberals do when they can’t win at the ballot box – they legislate from the bench to achieve their goals.”

That sort of thing can be prevented, the governor asserts, with “your generous contribution of $100, $50, $20 or whatever you can afford.”

While the speed of the fundraising campaign might be remarkable, Mike McCabe says politicians using a hot-button issue to spur donations isn’t all that surprising.

“Anything that is an opportunity to raise donations leads to those kinds of solicitations on both sides,” said McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a liberal-leaning group that tracks campaign spending in the state and pushes for campaign finance reform.

“If it’s a hot-button that they can press, the hotter the button the better as far as they’re concerned,” McCabe added.

And issues don’t come any hotter in Wisconsin than Act 10, the law led by Walker and a Republican-controlled Legislature that curbs collective bargaining for most public employees in the state.

The act’s controversial provisions, including limiting wage negotiations to the rate of inflation and requiring employees to contribute to their pensions and contribute more to their health insurance, set off a firestorm when it was first introduced in February 2011. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the Capitol to rally against it, and unions and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin launched a campaign to recall Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and several Republican senators. Walker, Kleefisch and all but one of the senators survived the recall, with support from voters who rallied around Walker and the passage of Act 10.

Colas’ ruling, for many Democrats, came as validation of what they believed all along, that Act 10 is unconstitutional. The celebration could be short-lived, however. State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen on Tuesday asked for a stay of the judge’s ruling, that Act 10 remain in force while the case moves into the appeals system.

Act 10, McCabe says, falls under the category of health-care reform, wars, battles over birth control and any other issue that churns political emotion: They’re good for the campaign pocketbook.

“Unfortunately it becomes standard operating procedure that if you are on the winning side, you say, ‘We won, give us money.’ If you’ve lost, you say, ‘It’s not over yet, give us money,” McCabe said. “If it’s a button they can press that creates an emotional response, they will do it.”

Rubber stamp? Hardly. For one thing, a big reason the judge threw this out was that police and firemen were exempted. Even before the ruling, Scott stated that the law should have applied equally, and will vote for that correction in the future. While Scott supports much of what Walker did, he is far more market oriented than Lassa or Walker. In fact, Lassa came out as a crony capitalist, saying that government should “invest” “Seed money” in ventures of its choosing. This creates classes of winners and losers. Tax break, as Lassa recommends for some? That means that OTHERS pay proportionately more and are at a competitive disadvantage. Subsidy? That means SOME will have less so others can have more, and at best, it is a wash. But because of red tape and bureaucracy, plus strings attached to the money, it is likely that twice as many jobs are destroyed in one sector so that another can be favored. Usually it is established interests and the politically connected who win from this market interference, and maybe that is the plan- to punish enemies and buy friends with the tax payers’ money and the force of government.

Scott knows that if you keep government small, taxes and regulations few and simple, that people will have more money to save, spend and invest and that the economy and the people of Wisconsin will be way better off than with the tinkering that Lassa or other politicians of either party can dream up.

Another part of the incumbents worry is that she is facing a real, worthy opponent. Help us make the race even more interesting.

What should be clear to all in the over taxed, over licensed, over-regulated, over-controlled and interfered with market, is that it is not working. We did better, had more opportunity and job growth when government helped less and interfered less. LET FREEDOM WORK in the market place, as well as in our lives.

ptg13

Real opponent? You must be smoking something that aint legal. Anyone who meets this guy knows he is a joke (and is probably a little scared of him with his criminal background). Also what seed investments are you referring to? What facts about economic shifts and job numbers are you sourcing? It seems really that you are just spouting from your arse mate when you make these claim with no basis of historical fact.

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